Michael Shulman

Genentech: Britain's National Health Won't Pay for Avastin

Your analysis would be fine if this was about engineering a bridge, not curing a human being. While the typical patient responds to Avastin and lives longer for 5.5 months, some live more than two years. What is the value of a human life? An advanced prosthetic device for a returning vet costs $65,000 -- should we give them a simple peg leg since we should not pay for them to enjoy life to the fullest with a more functional leg? The real issue is the government's role in determining who lives and who dies -- it should be minimal -- consumers should be choosing life insurance policies that clearly state what the company will and will not pay for in fairly general understandable terms.

On another note, the NICE was overruled by British courts when they refused to pay for Herceptin for a breast cancer patient. My guess is the same thing will eventually happen for Avastin once Genentech publishes longer term survival data for a subset of the population being treated -- in the US, of course. Then the National Health Service can determine, statistically, how much money it saved by killing off some people prematurely.

For the record, I write a biotech investment newsletter and recommend Genentech. I do not own the stock.